Last week I did a webinar that described how to use Mekko Graphics charts to build a sales pipeline dashboard. The first few charts were Marimmeko charts that displayed the current deals in the pipeline. You can see the presentation here:

Show individual opportunities in the charts. You want to focus management and the sales force on the top opportunities in each pipeline stage.

If you’ve got too many opportunities, summarize the smaller ones in an “Other” series. This is a great Mekko Graphics function that allows you to automatically put all opportunities below a certain dollar value in a segment that appears on the top of each bar. There’s an example on p. 3 of the deck.

Supplement the chart data with key statistics. I put average deal size and number of deals in a data row at the bottom of the chart on p.4 of the deck. You can then see these key numbers for each pipeline stage.

Group the opportunities along key dimensions. if you have many opportunities, you can view them by product line, sales office, sales rep, channel, or customer industry vertical. This will give your senior management a top-level view of the pipeline. The product managers can focus on the product line view and the sales management on the sales office view. You can see an example on p. 5 of the deck.

If you group along key dimensions, drill down to individual opportunities. On p. 6 of the deck you can see an example of the individual opportunities in a specific product line.